Meg and Beth looked identical. They both had what her mother called the ‘Bird face’. It was the same as her dad’s
and the same as her auntie Lorna’s and the same as Granny Bird’s. Apple cheeks, high foreheads, wide smiles. The only difference was that Megan’s hair was brown and curly like Mum’s, and Bethan’s was straight and black like Dad’s. Rory and Rhys, the twins, looked like their mum. They had ‘Douglas faces’. Low foreheads, long noses, neat bee-stung lips, and narrow blue eyes peering curiously from behind curtains of long blonde hair.
People always said, ‘
Oh, such lovely looking children
.’ They said, ‘
You must be so proud, Mrs Bird
.’ They said, ‘
What perfect angels
.’
And Mum would say, ‘
You should see them when they’re at home
,’ and roll her eyes, with one hand running through Rory’s hair, the other wrapped around Rhys’s hand and her voice full of love.
‘How many have you got?’ Meg called out to her sister.
‘Eleven. How about you?’
‘Fifteen.’
Their mother appeared at the bottom of the steps with the twins in tow. ‘The boys have got nine each, I think we’re almost there,’ she said. ‘Think
yellow
,’ she added with an exaggerated wink. The boys let go of her hands and ran towards the slide at the bottom of the garden that had yellow handles. Bethan ran towards an upturned bucket that was actually orange. But Megan knew exactly where her mother meant. The St John’s wort bush right in front of them. She walked towards it and let her eyes roam over the clouds of yellow flowers abuzz with fat bumble bees before they came to rest on a row of terracotta pots underneath, overflowing with eggs and small yellow puffball chicks with glued-on eyes.
She was about to scoop up the eggs and chicks when her mother touched her on her shoulder, her soft dry hands firm against Meg’s sun-freckled skin. ‘Share them,’ she whispered softly, ‘with the little ones. Make it fair.’
Meg was about to complain but then she took a deep breath and nodded. ‘Here!’ she called out to her siblings. ‘Look! There’s millions.’
All three hurtled to the St John’s wort bush and their mother divided up the remaining eggs into four piles and handed them to each child in turn. ‘Already starting to melt,’ she said, licking some chocolate from the edge of her thumb, ‘better get them indoors.’
The cool of the house was shocking after the heat outside. It draped itself over Meg’s bare skin like a cold flannel. Dad was pouring squash into beakers at the kitchen table. The dog was dozing on the window seat. The yellow walls of the kitchen were entirely covered over with the children’s art. Megan ran her finger along the edges of a drawing that she’d done when she was four. It always amazed her to think it had been stuck to the wall there, in the very same place, with the very same piece of Sellotape, for six whole years. She could barely remember being four. She certainly could not remember sitting and drawing this portrait entitled ‘megn and mumy’, composed of two string-legged people with crazy hair, split-in-half smiles and hands twice the size of their bodies, suspended in a gravity-free world of spiky blue trees and floating animals. The wall of art was a conversation piece for anyone coming into the house; it spanned all three walls, spread itself over cupboard doors, over door frames,
around corners and even into the pantry. Dad would try and take some down occasionally, to ‘
update the wall
’ as he’d put it. But Mum would just smile her naughty-little-girl smile and say, ‘
Over my dead body
.’ If Dad ever saw one of his children producing a piece of art he’d snatch it away the moment it was shown to him and say, ‘
That is so very beautiful that I shall have to put it in my special folder
,’ and spirit it away somewhere (occasionally tucked inside his clothes) before Mum saw it and stuck it to the wall.
‘Now,’ she said, pulling her tangly hair back into a ponytail and removing her apron, ‘you can eat all the eggs you like as long as you promise you’ll still have room for lunch. And remember, keep the foils for the craft box!’
The ‘craft box’ was another bugbear of Dad’s. It had once been a small plastic toolbox neatly filled with sequins and pipe cleaners and sheets of gold leaf. Over the years it had expanded into an ever-growing family of giant plastic crates that lived in a big cupboard in the hall, filled with an impossible tangle of old string lengths, knots of wool, empty sweet wrappers, toilet-roll middles, old underwear cut into rags, packing chips and used wrapping paper. Megan didn’t really do crafts any more – she was nearly eleven now – and Bethan had never been as creative as her sister; while the boys of course would rather be roaming the gardens or charging about the house than sitting with a tube of Pritt and a handful of old ice-lolly sticks. No one really used the craft box any more, but that didn’t stop Lorelei constantly topping it up with all sorts of old junk.
She pulled the egg foils eagerly from the children now as
they discarded them, smoothing them flat with her fingertips into delicate slivers, her face shining with satisfaction. ‘So pretty,’ she said, piling them together, ‘like little slices of rainbow. And of course, they will always make me think of today. This perfect day with my lovely children when the sun shone and shone and all was right with the world.’
She looked at each child in turn and smiled her smile. She ran a hand over Rhys’s hair and stroked it from his eyes. ‘My lovely children,’ she said again, her words encompassing all four of them, but her loving gaze fixed firmly upon her lastborn child.
Rhys had been the smallest of all of Lorelei’s babies. Megan and Bethan had both weighed over nine pounds. Rory had been the first twin out, weighing in at a healthy six pounds and fifteen ounces. And then, as her mother often recounted, out popped poor Rhys like a plucked quail, a little under four pounds, blue and wrinkled and just about able to breathe on his own. They’d put him under lights – or ‘
lightly toasted him
’ as Lorelei also often recounted – and declared him fit to go home only after three long days.
Lorelei still worried about him more than the other three. At just six years old he was smaller than Rory, smaller than most of the children in his class, with a pale complexion and a tendency to catch colds and tummy bugs. He clung to his mother whenever they were out in public, wailed like a baby when he got hurt and, unlike his brother, didn’t like playing with other children. He seemed happy only when he was here, at home, brother on one side, mother on the other. Megan didn’t know what to make of him. Sometimes she wished
he’d never been born. Sometimes she really thought they’d be better off without him. He didn’t ‘match’. All the Birds were fun and gregarious, silly and bright. Rhys just dragged them down.
Megan unthinkingly squeezed her fist around the gold foil that she’d just unpeeled from the big egg she’d found in the cherry tree, and jumped slightly as her mother’s hand slapped down against hers.
‘Foil!’ Lorelei cried. ‘Foil!’
She immediately let her fist fall open and her mother took the crumpled foil with a smile. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she said sweetly. She let her gaze fall on the foil and said, ‘Look at it, so pretty, so shiny, so … happy.’
The Easter holidays stretched out for another week. The heatwave continued and the Bird children came indoors only for beakers of squash, slices of bread and butter and desperately needed visits to the toilet.
Friends came and went, there was a day trip to the beach at Weston-super-Mare, and on the last weekend of the holidays they had a visit from Lorelei’s sister Pandora and her two teenage sons. Dad filled the paddling pool and the adults drank glasses of Pimm’s with fruit-shaped plastic ice cubes bobbing about in them. Megan’s cousin Tom played David Bowie songs on his heavily stickered guitar. Rory burst the paddling pool with a stick and the water seeped heavily on to the lawn, leaving it waterlogged and boggy, and Dad said, ‘Well, that’s that then.’ Lorelei scooped the floppy remains of the punctured pool into her arms like an injured child and
carried it into the garage murmuring, ‘Dad’ll fix it up.’ Dad said, ‘You and I both know that Dad won’t fix it up. I have no idea how to fix paddling pools and I still haven’t fixed the one that got burst last year.’ And Lorelei smiled and blew him a kiss across the garden.
Dad sighed and said, ‘Well. We now have
three
punctured paddling pools sitting in our garage – this house is just a dumping ground,’ and raised his eyebrows heavenwards.
Pandora smiled and said, ‘Just like our dad. He never could throw anything away.’
Megan’s other cousin Ben smiled and said, ‘Tell us again about what Lorelei used to collect when she was a child.’
Pandora frowned and then smiled. ‘Autumn leaves. Ring pulls. Tags from new clothes. Cinema stubs. The silver foil from Mum’s cigarette packets.’
‘And hair!’ said Ben gleefully. ‘Don’t forget the hair.’
‘Yes,’ said Pandora, ‘any time anyone in our family had a haircut, Lorelei begged to keep it. She had a shopping bag full of it under her bed. It was quite gruesome.’
The adults and teenagers laughed and Megan looked at them curiously. They’d had this conversation before – every time they were together, it sometimes seemed – and whenever she heard them talking about her mum like this it sounded different. The older she got the less she found it funny and the more she found it peculiar. Because she was now the age that her mother had been at the time of these strange childhood collections and she could no more imagine herself collecting old hair than she could asking to go to school on a Saturday.
‘Are you laughing at me?’ her mother asked good-naturedly as she returned from the garage.
‘No, no, no!’ said Ben. ‘Absolutely not. We’re just talking about you affectionately.’
‘Hmm,’ said Lorelei, wiping her damp hands down the length of her long denim skirt. ‘I strongly suspect not.’
And then she spread her arms upwards, revealing unshaved armpits of lush brown curls and declared, ‘Look at that sky, just look at it. The blueness of it. Makes me want to snatch out handfuls of it and put it in my pockets.’
Megan saw a look pass over her father’s face at that moment. Love and worry. As though he was aching to say something unspeakable.
The look softened as Megan watched and then he smiled and said, ‘If my wife had her way, her pockets would be full of pieces of every single thing in the world.’
‘Oh, yes!’ beamed Lorelei. ‘They would be. Totally and absolutely
bulging
.’
Pandora had brought home-made butterfly cakes with fluffed-up cream and more tiny yellow chicks atop.
Lorelei served them in the garden with tea from a pot and scones and cream. There was more Pimm’s and a plastic bowl of strawberries. The twins ran barefoot back and forth from the hosepipe to fill their water pistols, which, after countless tellings-off, they were using to squirt only each other. Tom and Ben had retired to the bottom of the garden to smoke cigarettes in the hammock and share secret jokes together. Megan and Bethan sat side by side, listening to the grown-ups talk.
When Megan herself was a grown-up and people came to ask about her childhood, it was afternoons such as these that would impel her to say, ‘
My childhood was perfect
.’
And it was. Perfect.
They lived in a honey-coloured house that sat hard up against the pavement of a picture-postcard Cotswolds village and stretched out beyond into three-quarters of an acre of rambling half-kempt gardens. Their mother was a beautiful hippy called Lorelei with long tangled hair and sparkling green eyes who treated her children like precious gems. Their father was a sweet gangly man called Colin, who still looked like a teenager with floppy hair and owlish round-framed glasses. They all attended the village school, they ate home-cooked meals together every night, their extended family was warm and clever; there was money for parties and new paddling pools, but not quite enough for foreign travel, but it didn’t matter, because they lived in paradise. And even as a child, Megan knew this to be paradise. Because, she could see with hindsight, her mother told her so. Her mother existed entirely in the moment. And she made every moment sparkle. No one in Megan’s family was ever allowed to forget how lucky they were. Not even for a second.
A cloud passed over the sun just then and Lorelei laughed and pointed and said, ‘Look! Look at that cloud! Isn’t it wonderful? It looks
exactly
like an elephant!’
The keys were where Lorelei had always left them, under a cracked plant pot behind a water pipe beneath the kitchen window. Meg pulled them out and dusted the sticky cobwebs from her fingertips. ‘Yuck.’
The house had been impenetrable by either of its front doors for many years now. The family had always come in and out through the kitchen door at the back and for the last few years Lorelei had been using both hallways at the front as bonus ‘storage areas’.
‘Right,’ Meg said, rejoining Molly by the back door, ‘let’s go. Deep breath.’ She threw her daughter a brave smile and was gratified to see her smile reflected back at her.
‘You OK, Mum?’
Meg nodded. Of course she was OK. Meg was always OK. Someone had to be and she’d been the one to draw that straw. ‘I’m fine, love, thank you.’
Molly peered at her curiously and then took one of her hands in her own and squeezed it gently. Meg almost flinched at the tender power of it. Her daughter’s touch. Until recently her last memory of her daughter’s touch had been the sting of a palm across her cheek, the jab of toes against her shins, the drag of fingernails down her arm. It had been that bad. Truly. Everything she’d been warned about teenage girls, squared and squared again. But lately, things had started to change. Lately, it seemed as though her daughter had started to like her again.
‘Thank you, love,’ she said again.
‘You know you can talk about it, don’t you? You know I
want to listen. I want to help. You’ve lost your mummy. If I lost my mummy, I’d …’ Molly’s eyes filled with tears and she smiled through them. ‘Oh, God, well, you know.’